Posted by
sengan
on Monday August 31, @05:34PMfrom the in-a-gigantic-nutshell dept.The Freedows OS team
has split into 2 camps: Freedows and the
Alliance. This feature
article presents the view of the Alliance, and has been
written by Alliance Ambassador
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr.
We hope to have a response to it from Freedows Project Lead
Reece K. Sellin tomorrow.

Right now, the Alliance is a work in progress. Every member of Alliance
wishes not to see the mistakes of the past (some of which contributed to the
situation that lead to the creation of Alliance) to be repeated, and we are
currently in the process of deciding how things should be. Shortly, things
will get settled, and I can hand out a 'Final' of how Alliance is structured
and the scope of development. But, as things stand, this statement is a
decent aprasial of Alliance.

For those wondering exactly how quickly things can change during a time
like this: When it came time to get a new server set up, Chris T. in the
project got us set up with two servers. Ramon wrote the document that
appears below and by the time that I send this, there's now three servers
going to be handling project information... The project changed scope and
names a little bit, and is now refered to as Alliance, the Alliance,
Alliance OS
(for the OS that results from the project), not the Alliance Kernel Project
or variants (that may appear below - I haven't edited the content)

Introduction

Though this is probably currently unknown to most people who are or have
been involved in the Freedows project, there have occured several
incidents on the management side of Freedows in the last few weeks that
have led to the formation of the Alliance Operating System Kernel Project
(which will be referred to as Alliance.) This document will attempt to
explain some of the history and motives behind this project, as well as
its goals and some of its management details.

History

The history of Alliance is still short and will be discussed briefly. We
will not discuss the occurances in the Freedows project in detail, as
these are irrelevant to this text. Suffice it to say, that there have
been disagreements between the developers and leads of the Freedows
project and the project lead, Mr. Sellin, in respect to his conduct in the
management and public relations of Freedows. It has been attempted to
come to an agreement on this matter; but unfortunately, this has turned
out to be impossible. As the power hierarchy of Freedows has been set up
in such a way by Mr. Sellin that his power is uncontrolled, the only
option left was a mass resignation and reformation of the project under a
different name, with similar design goals but different managment, as to
solve the current problems and avoiding such a thing happening in the
future.

Within the previous week, there has been a mass resignation of developers
and non-developers from the Freedows project. Of the developers, the
development lead, the kernel team lead, and both kernel team assistant
leads have resigned, along with most other developers, including all of
those developers who have been with the project longest and thus are most
experienced with it. Even now still, developers are resigning, though
most have done so already. Some of the developers are not informed about
the current situation, which is one of the reasons this document was
written. From the non-development side have also resigned many people.
The most important of these is Davis Sickmon, the infamous Freedows
project ambassador and public relations person. Also has resigned David
Walluck, the HTML team lead, and others that have slipped my mind at the
moment.

The resigned Freedows members have reunited to form a new project, for
which the name Alliance has been adopted. (The name Alliance was thought
of independently by Davis Sickmon and Daniel Arbuckle, after which it was
adopted with the consent of the other recently resigned members. The name
Alliance is also quite suitable, as it can be by pure coincidence
shortened to AllOS.)

This document will attempt to explain the goals and some managment details
of this project. While development is continuing as of old (the
development lists are owned by Alliance members, and will be used for the
time being for development for the Alliance project,) the new management
policies are still being discussed. As much information will be given in
this document as is currently available.

Goal

The goal of the Alliance project is to develop and maintain an operating
system core based on the Caching Model of Operating System Functionality
as developed as Stanford and as modified by the Alliance (previously the
Freedows) development team, and on the Common Object Request Brokering
Architecture as specified by the Object Management Group. Used in the
development process will be the specifications created and maintained by
the former Freedows and current Alliance members. The resulting final
product will be called the Alliance Core System and will be released under
the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The reasons for developing an operating system using such a model are
described in detail in a Slashdot article about the Freedows project
posted on August 27, 1998. In short, this model provides excellent
emulation capabilities, a good environment for building a distributed
system, as well as flexibility combined with speed.

It is not the goal of the Alliance project to provide emulation
environments for every conceivable platform, as was originally put forth
as goal for the Freedows project by its project lead. The Alliance team
will probably port one or more existing open-source operating systems to
function on top of the Alliance Core System, as to test the design and to
provide a good starting point for the actual usage of the system. These
operating system emulations will be distributed separately from the
Alliance Core System, though.

Also, it is not the goal of the Alliance team to provide a working, ready
to use distribution of the Alliance Core System together with operating
system emulations and applications, userfriendly setup and configuration
programs, etc. The forming of an end-user distribution will be left up to
third parties, much like is the case with the Linux kernel and its
distributions.

Finally, it is not the intention of the Alliance team to take over the
world with its operating system, as was put forth as goal by the Freedows
project lead. We hope to create an operating system that will be chosen
above other systems for its merits; but the Alliance team makes no claims
that this will be the case. The organisation of the Alliance Core is
experimental and has never been tried, nor proven, before as far as we
know. Thus, the real merits and faults of the system cannot be known
until a working system has been built.

Management

The new managment setup in the Alliance project is still being discussed.
There are two schools of thought here.

The first school of thought wishes to retain a function similar to the
former Project Lead in the Freedows team. This time around, though, the
power of this function will be limited through a complicated set of
back-control and veto rights. Moreover, unlike in the Freedows project,
this lead would be democratically chosen by the project's members. A draft
of a constitution has been posted by Davis Sickmon to the people directly
involved in setting up the Alliance project. If this setup is chosen, the
constitution will be finished, finalised, and made public.

The second school of thought wishes the Alliance project to be without
lead. All decisions would be democratically voted by the people directly
involved with the decision itself, where the decision will be taken
according to the majority of votes.

Both systems are thought to avoid problems in the future like those that
have caused the breakup from the Freedows project. More information will
be made known when it is available.

Attitude towards Freedows

The Alliance project is not, and will never be, affiliated in any way with
the Freedows project. It is our understanding that the Freedows Project
Lead, Mr. Sellin, intends to continue the Freedows project even after
having been deprieved of developers. The Alliance project has no bad
feelings towards Freedows; we do not intend te steal any of its
developers, or anything of the kind. All developers will be urged to
think about the facts and to choose a project by themselves. It is not up
to Alliance members to give them any advice on this matter.
Also, as the Alliance Core will be distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License, the Freedows project will be able to use the
Alliance core as core for their project, if they wish.

On the other hand, let it be clear that any Freedows member, and most
certainly Mr. Sellin himself, will have no jurisdiction whatsoever over
and within the Alliance project.

The Alliance project would like to wish the Freedows project good luck in
achieveing its goal (which is not exactly the same as the goal of the
Alliance project, as we understand it.) We hope the Freedows project
members will take this sportively and do the same.

Current course of action

In this paragraph, it will be attempted to give a projection about the
immediate future of the Alliance project.

We are currently in the process of registring a new domain name,
AllOS.org, for the Alliance project. The Freedows internet server, which
is owned by Lloyd Duhon, the former Freedows development lead, will be put
to service as the main Alliance Server for the time being, after the
domain name freedows.org has been returned to the Freedows project. We
are also in the process of acquiring a new pair of servers, one Linux and
one FreeBSD server, which will hopefully be able to get a high-bandwidth
connection at the George Washington University (Cache Kernel developer
Chris Trawick is negotiating on this front.) Within a couple of months,
the new servers should be ready and will be used to provide WWW, FTP, and
mailing list services, as well as a CVS repository for the development
process and, if this turns out to be neccessary, perhaps even shell
accounts for developers (Perhaps also other services, if they turn out to
be needed.)

Official Alliance conferences will be held in the IRC channel #AllOS on
EFNET (see http://www.irchelp.org/ for an EFNET server near you) though
some of us will probably still be found in the channel #Freedows as well.

Development will continue as of old. As a matter of fact, developers
shouldn't notice all that much of a difference, except for the fact that
will be referred to Alliance in stead of Freedows in specifications and
code. The old development mailing lists, freedows@makelist.com and a
whole range of subteam lists (freedows-ck, freedows-fssk, freedows-iosk,
system-orb etc.) will be used for the Alliance project until the Alliance
servers are up. Daniel Arbuckle, the kernel team lead, has posted an
official declaration of independance to the main development list. The
same declaration also goes for all subteam lists.

Davis Sickmon, former Freedows project ambassador, had, before resigning
from Freedows, tried to fill some empty positions within the Freedows
project. He has received a lot of responses from interested people, which
have not been processed yet. Our attitude towards Freedows is, as was
mentioned earlier, hard but fair. These people will be posted a message
explaining the situation, and requested to make a choice themselves
between the Freedows and the Alliance project.

Conclusion

Due to unresolvable problems with the management of the Freedows project a
new project, Alliance, has been formed. This project has most of the
former Freedows developers as its members. Development will continue
undisturbed.

We hope to have informed you enough about the situation and about the
Alliance project to be able to make a choice between Freedows and
Alliance. We urge anybody who reads this message to use his own judgement
in this choice.

If you have any more questions, or if you would wish to join the Alliance
project, you can mail either Davis Sickmon or
Daniel Arbuckle . They (we) will be glad
to help you.